Sunday, April 26. 2009

Dave Winer wrote an article today on why there will be many Twitters, the gist of the argument is that:

4. I think it's pretty obvious that Twitter is on a trajectory to become one of the major media networks, a Turner, Fox, NBC, Time-Warner, Viacom, Disney. When it's apparent to more of the heads of these companies, they're going to start wondering why their stars are on Twitter and not on their own network.

5. The thought has probably also popped into the heads of the people at Twitter. They will try to make deals with some or all the media companies. They have a lot of power, and should be able to cut good deals. But as the negotiations go forward, it will become apparent to the execs that these guys are competitors. They will consider Make vs Buy. If they're smart, they'll do their deals with Twitter at the same time doing deals to get their own network going.

6. Luckily for the other media companies, users are portable. I'll explain. Say Ashton Kutcher (someone who I had never heard of until he showed up at a tech industry conference last year) decides to cut a deal with a major studio to head a new twitter-like network. Could happen. They'll get their network built, quietly, then start leaking it with teases on billboards of course, but also (you guessed it) on Twitter. When Oprah sees him do his network, she'll want one. And so will Larry King and Shaq, and all the celebs who have yet to make a splash on Twitter. Brad Pitt and Ed Norton will call theirs The Fight Club. George Clooney's will be Oceans Million. Prince will hang out in Paisley Park. And you think Apple won't have one? It might have a 140-char limit, but it won't just be text. ;->

There's a lot of money to be made in these networks and it costs so little to start one. An average Hollywood film costs two or three times as much as all the money Twitter, Inc. has raised so far. Spiderman 3 cost $258 million. That's just one movie. And over time the cost will come way down. That's why I suggested that FriendFeed get a clone ready, now -- so they can do deals with the media companies when they're ready. Which might happen any week now, if it hasn't already happened.

I think he is right to an extent, in that there will be multiple Twitters, but wrong in that there will be many.

Firstly, I'd hypothesize that Twitter is not "media" per se - its closest in architecture to a unified comms (UC) system, that Telcos have had as a holy grail for years. Thus it is a Telco type system, not broadcast, and the public Telcos tend to have very few players in a space after early shakeout (the UK in mobile being a total exception with 6 (un)viable operators, most countries have 3 (or even 2) in declining order of size).

Secondly, Telcos typically have boundaries, either via network reach or licences which allow many (usually national) multi-operator ecosystems to arise. The internet does not, language is probably the first natural limit and then text characters - so the "big get bigger" faster on the 'Net. Twitter is already global.

Thirdly, I'd argue Twitter itself is massively scalable because of the one to one pub/sub architecture. The old Usenet broke down into smaller groups because it was pub/sub at the group (many to one), not individual level. But on Twitter, if you have no interest in say celebrities you just don't follow them. Also this makes it harder to spam which tended to kill earlier many-one architectures.

Fourthly, Twitter;s open API means it is evolving in a "Darwinian" mode for its users as various 3rd parties build on the tools various users want. In fact the reason earlier Telco UC systems (and Pownce, Jaiku and Friendffed) have failed to take off is that they tried to prescribe too much of the user experience - making them complex at first entry, and not work the way users wanted.

Fifthly, Dave is right that its not expensive to start a Twitterclone (we have run up an identi.ca system on an Amazon instance, costs a few hundred pounds in hosting and effort) - but its expensive to run as it scales, especially if you have to fund customer acquisition from competing services. The Slebs are going to migrate to the services with the biggest user base, the people who follow slebs (aka the mainstream) will......follow the slebs. That leaves the other services fighting for the early adopters and some % of the mass market and various niches.

So, if I was to bet, I'd bet on 2-3 major "Twitter" type plays in each language group (where strong national barrriers don't apply) and a number of much smaller niche usage services.

This is not to say that over time no newer services emerges which take over from Twitter, I think thats very likely as this whole area is still in very early stage - just that there is not space for a lot of them at any one time.

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